Dijkstra – unul din marii oameni ai secolului trecut despre realitatea economică:
“An unpleasant complication is that the world of finance is so disreputable and that a whole bunch of new euphemisms has to be introduced to cover up this new layer of dishonesty. For instance, there is no such thing as “making money”: some people succeed in transferring money out of the pockets of others into their own. A number of years ago, the institutions that try to become rich by speculating at someone else’s expense —in Western Civilization known as a “bank”— needed a new euphemism to cover their activities and they started to refer to themselves as “the financial industry”. Lately, they have started to refer to their more elaborate extortion schemes as “(sophisticated) banking products”! Industries are expected to produce something, aren’t they?” EW Dijkstra 1992http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1165.html

Paul Volcker:
Volcker has long been suspicious of financial products that most people can’t understand. One of his four grandchildren, Colin Zima, heard about it a lot when he studied financial engineering.

“He would constantly joke about me studying to be a crook,” says Zima, 25, who worked at UBS for a year before taking a job in 2007 as a statistician at Google Inc. in San Francisco.